Harriet Brewis
Mar 06, 2023
content.jwplatform.com
If there’s one thing we can count on Steven Spielberg for, it’s making space exciting.
The creative force behind everyone’s all-time favourite E.T. has shared his thoughts on extraterrestrial life and the recent spate of UFO sightings – and his theories are pretty mind-blowing.
The Oscar-winning movie maker recently had his brain picked by Stephen Colbert in a wide-ranging interview for The Late Show.
And whilst the Close Encounters director admitted he’d never seen a UFO himself, he said he believed there was “something going on”.
Spielberg was referring to the unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAPs) that have been littering North American skies in recent weeks, with US officials admitting they didn’t know the origin of at least three flying objects that the military shot down last month.
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"I think what has been coming up recently is fascinating, just absolutely fascinating,” Spielberg told Colbert.
“And I think the secrecy that is shrouding all of these sightings and the lack of transparency until the Freedom of Information Acts compels certain materials to be released publicly… I think there is something going on that simply needs extraordinary due diligence."
He continued: "I don’t believe we’re alone in the universe. I think it’s mathematically impossible that we are the only intelligent species in the cosmos. I think that’s totally impossible.
"At the same time, it also seems impossible that anyone would visit us from 400 million lightyears from here – except in the movies – unless it figures out some way of basically jumping the shark, so to speak, and getting here through wormholes.”
But, he conceded: “I’m not an astrophysicist. I really can’t speak the language of the people that do it so well out of JPL (Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory), but I just know – as a person that makes movies and uses his imagination and also is a person that is insatiably curious about UFOs – or UAPs – that there’s something going on that’s not being disclosed to us.”
“There’s Something Out There” - Steven Spielberg on Alien Visitors, and an “E.T.” Sequelyoutu.be
So what does he think these mysterious objects are?
"The most optimistic thing I feel about these things that we’re seeing in the skies – or the army and navy and airforce are recording on their gun cameras – is that what if they’re not from an advanced civilisation 300 million lightyears from here? But what if it’s us, 500,000 years in the future, that is coming back to document the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st century because they’re anthropologists?," he said.
"And they know something we don’t quite know, yet, that has occurred, and they’re trying to track the last hundred years of our history?"
That’s quite a thought.
And, as Colbert pointed out, the nice thing about that theory is that “we survive”.
Yes, Spielberg agreed. Or, at least, “a certain percentage of us survive that allows these other generations to flourish”.
Nodding to two of his most famous works, Colbert then asked whether the filmmaker thought an E.T. or War of the Worlds scenario was more likely if we were ever to face alien visitors.
Spielberg went for the more family-friendly option, stressing: “I believe that if any extraterrestrial civilisation has journeyed all the way here its because of curiosity and science and its not about aggression.”
He added: “And the fact they’ve been this patient with us and haven’t turned the Earth into a burnt-out cinder is extraordinary – you have to applaud them.”
Who knows, maybe one day we will.
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